The Longest Journey

After four decades in politics, Jacques Chirac is facing his greatest test. How he meets it will determine whether France regains its cohesion after the shock of the presidential election, or whether the country of the first modern revolution moves to the brink of ungovernability. When he was elected for his first term in 1995, the neo-Gaullist President pledged to heal France's "social fracture," uniting the nation and achieving a reconciliation with those who felt left behind by progress. The first round of presidential voting on April 21 showed the depth of the political establishment's failure on that score as a third of voters backed left or right extremists who reject the political system, and nearly 30% abstained.

Now, Chirac has to deliver on his promise of 1995 if France is not to splinter into a fractious mess of conflicting groups, with Jean-Marie Le Pen's far-right National Front looming as the symbol of what has gone wrong with the Fifth Republic. Chirac's central task must be to replace the bad temper manifested last month with a sense of rational togetherness, and to enable the French to put April 21 behind them.

Unfortunately, his record hardly inspires confidence. He is a consummate election winner who has not known what to do with victory. Now 69, he has advocated everything from Thatcher-Reaganite economics to "French laborism," drawing in the working class. He has faced both ways on Europe, and he picks up and discards ideas like lint. He hits rhetorical high notes in talking of France's place in the world, but his main campaign plank this spring was the rising crime rate which, while a real concern for voters, took the debate into vintage far-right territory. Surrounded by a wave of scandal allegations, Chirac is not exactly the man one would choose to lead a national revival around the core republican values of freedom, equality and fraternity.

His healing national role is made all the more complicated by the immediate political job of forging a broad center-right movement to win legislative elections next month, giving him the majority in the National Assembly he has lacked since the left triumphed at the last parliamentary poll in 1997. With only 19.6% of the first-round vote, his core support is thin. On top of which, the President has to deal with the divisions in the mainstream French center-right — three of his lieutenants will be jostling to become Prime Minister, and two prominent non-Gaullist leaders say they have no wish to play yes-men in a Chirac-led grouping. He will also face a determined attempt by the Socialists to recover from their Prime Minister's humiliation. Their party's future is at stake, its plight reflected in the backing its leaders felt obliged to give Chirac last Sunday to block the National Front. The mainstream left will be counting on voters recoiling from the chaotic behavior that let Le Pen through the first round. But retrospective sympathy from guilty voters won't be enough to revive a Socialist Party that has lost its working-class supporters and has to decide whether to return to its old roots or forge a new character for itself. For his part, Le Pen wants to win enough seats next month to hold the balance of power in Parliament. Being able to call the legislative shots would be an even more potent source of power than his first-round performance for the one-eyed former paratrooper who would send immigrants home, leave the European Union, abolish income tax and introduce draconian law-and-order measures, including restoration of the death penalty.

Even if Chirac does get his parliamentary majority, he will not be out of the woods. Le Pen will keep up his vicious barking. The far left will not let anybody forget its nearly 11% score in the first round. The poorer sections of society are alienated from the Parisian élite that is so unwilling to relinquish its stranglehold on France. If the President gains control of the Assembly, the left will take to the streets, particularly if the new Prime Minister applies a tough rightist program aimed at undercutting Le Pen. France's European commitment could also be in question, particularly if farm policy is put up for reform.

Since Le Pen's face appeared on television screens at 8 p.m. on April 21 as the President's second-round opponent, French politics have revolved around him. Now, the challenge is to relegate him to the sidelines by dealing with the causes of the fear on which he thrives. If Jacques Chirac can get that process under way, he will deserve to rank alongside his hero Charles de Gaulle as a politician who brought France back from the edge. But does the marathon man of French politics, for whom electoral advantage has always taken precedence, have it in him to rise to the task?